Not a Tiny House

Trained architects tend to roll their eyes when we designers start playing with SketchUp. Happily, my trained architect friends were more supportive, even after learning that this thought exercise was a tiny house, which on its own begs for an eye roll.

I’m already a semi-minimalist but I approached the design of a radically minimal house using the same principles and processes I bring to designing digital artifacts. In this case, however, I allowed myself to be the user for whom I was designing.

Disciplines

Research, Architecture, Experience Design, Industrial Design, 3D

Maximum Volume

The maximum exterior envelope for one of these “temporary” buildings is 8.5 x 13 x 28 feet (2.6 x 3.9 x 8.5 meters). I started by simply pushing out to all corners of this envelope, eschewing the volume-eating gables and pitches seen on most tiny houses. Interior volume could then only be increased by making the exterior walls as thin as is practical. A welded steel skeleton of 8 posts and 10 beams provides ample rigidity to frame and glaze the intervening spans while keeping total wall thickness to 6 inches (15 cm) throughout.

Space Mirrors Life

As with any UX project, I created a list of user stories corresponding to the activities of daily life. I derived the proportion of each “room” directly from the proportion of time typically spent on those activities. An enormous glazed pocket door extends the central living space seamlessly outside as weather permits.

Visual Serenity

I have an affinity for extremely spare, serene spaces, a sensibility that lends itself to this project since any decorative flourish or even trim element would visually shrink and clutter the already small space.

Matte white walls, blonde wood, polished concrete, generous glazing and muted furnishings comprise the palette.